Maintaining Humans
Edward Jones‐Imhotep · Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks · 2012
This is a chapter about distrust. It focuses on the early Cold War, but it is not simply about the distrust of people or political actors: the distrust of humans. Its investigations occupy the physical, conceptual, and symbolic spaces around complex electronic instruments, but it is not strictly about the distrust of material and machines: the distrust of technology. Instead, I want to explore how, where, and why these seemingly distinct spheres of distrust—the human and the technological—came together and defined one another during the early Cold War. At a time when both people and technologies were perennially suspect, when the failure of electronic devices carried potentially catastrophic consequences, how were anxieties over the trustworthiness of machines in fact concerns over the reliability of humans?